The New Normal Is Too Boring for TV

The most shocking new show on television this season is The New Normal. It's shocking because it's so boring. A mere fifteen years ago, after Ellen DeGeneres came out, ABC put a parental advisory at the beginning of each episode of Ellen, and canned the show at least in part due to the pressure of conservative action groups. From that low point, we have risen into a pop-cultural universe where the premise of a gay couple's relationship to a surrogate mother simply does not have enough frisson to hold our attention. Gay people are becoming too boring for television.

Marriage equality may be the one significant political achievement you can actually sort of attribute to pop culture. After Ellen, there was Will & Grace, then there was Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and then Modern Family. All of these shows were comedy hits. They exposed a huge swath of Americans to positive homosexual characters. In 2004, 60 percent of Americans opposed gay marriage, according to the Pew Research Center. As of April this year, that number is down to 43 percent and dropping rapidly. But even the numbers fail to capture the depth of the change. Gay marriage — which stands in for the equality of gay people under the law — has become a marker of political sanity. It's not like the struggle is over — Mitt Romney still supports the Defense of Marriage Act. But when he supports it, he mumbles. The Democrats shout, less than a year after the President came to his senses. Marriage equality is not just good politics; it's necessary politics.

The New Normal is a more or less shameless attempt to capitalize on the success of these previous shows. But the problem is that they have been so successful as to render the matter moot. You can almost see the writers straining to find gay stereotypes that still work in order to be able to explode them. Elaborately themed photo shoots for children is not gay. Straight people do that in droves. Men who are obsessed with looking young into their fifties and are finicky about their clothes is not a signifier of gayness anymore. It's a signifier of living in a city. Straight people have more anal sex than ever before, too, which has led to one recent mind-bending headline: "More Straight Americans Than Gay Americans Having 'Gay Sex.'" You know what the writers of The New Normal find to distinguish their characters as gay? Antiquing and Grey Gardens. I would argue that antiquing is just a sign of middle age generally, though I have to admit they may have something with Grey Gardens. I have never met a straight man who understood the appeal.

The new normalcy is at the core of Americans' transformed attitudes, no question. Chris Kluwe's hilarious letter to Maryland state delegate Emmett C. Burns is a case in point. He framed the issue entirely as a civil-rights question, which is how Jay-Z understands the matter, too. The change is social as much as political or cultural. You have to meet exactly one gay couple with kids to know that they are in the identical situation as any heterosexual couple with kids. And from there, the assault of their rights becomes personal. Even to the most liberal white Americans of the 1960s, the civil-rights battle was something that was happening elsewhere, to other people. But the struggle for gay rights is happening on the block, to people just like me. It's very hard to look in people's faces at the playground and accept that they're not full people, or to stand by while others won't accept them as such.

One of the (admittedly minor) consequences of this incipient political triumph is that gay people have become boring. Is it wrong for me to mourn the passing of the worldly gay friend as a type? A night out with gay friends used to be a guaranteed great night out. You'd see some stuff. You would have no choice but to dance. You might even try a drug you'd never tried before. At any rate, you would learn something about the nature of human desire. I remember with particular vividness one evening in grad school that involved a foam-filled swimming pool in an abandoned factory. That was interesting. You know what the last two conversations I had with the gay couples in my neighborhood were about? Whether the BabyBjörn carrier is worth the money, and what the appropriate age to start a kid in taekwondo is. I mean, it couldn't get any more boring. What would Queer Eye for the Straight Guy look like today? A gay guy explains to a straight guy how to put money in dividend-earning ETFs to plan for his kids' college education?

The New Normal is a title that strains to live up to its promise of daring. The problem with The New Normal is that it is, in fact, the new normal. Why would anyone want to watch that?

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.